The Janice Mason Art Museum announced that 400 visitors signed the guest registry during the month of December.

In addition to the guests, Board Member Paul Fourshee said that numerous groups of school children attended the annual Festival of Trees exhibit, and visited Santa Claus when he was on hand at the museum. Fourshee gave the administrator’s report because Museum Administrator Paula Lisowsky was not present at last Thursday’s board meeting. Fourshee said, “That’s just pretty good,” then laughed, “That’s a lot. It wasn’t what we expected, it was better than expected.”

Portia Ezell said that the exhibit was larger every year.

Jan Culwell proposed that the museum discard the tree skirts with glitter as the skirts shed their shiny decorations causing difficulty during clean up.

Martha Davis agreed that the museum should “dump the skirts and start again” due to the glitter being found months later on the museum’s floor.

Ezell told the board that plans to begin the production of the musical “The Wiz” would need to be delayed due to the Trigg County High School’s need for the Little Theatre in march for an in-house theatrical production. “It’s a great thing that the arts and humanities teacher is doing. This time, we are looking to have a summer musical, which will work out well since we do not have to work around the school schedule,” she said.

Ezell said that she was looking forward to her production of “The Wiz” in mid-July. “This is pending approval from the State Department to extend the grant. We were supposed to use it by June 30, but since they were six months behind in awarding it, surely they will let us do it.”

“The Wiz” is an urban musical update of L. Frank Baum’s novel, “The Wizard of Oz.” The original production opened on Broadway in 1975 and featured an all African-American cast. Charlie Smalls composed the songs and lyrics of the production, which featured the hit “Ease on Down the Road.” A 1978 film of the production starred Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor as the title character.